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Krista's Journal: The Practical Mystery of Yoga

September 11, 2008

After my interview with Matthew Sanford a few years ago, I started thinking about yoga again. I had dabbled in it intermittently across the years, but until very recently the structure of my life did not yield happily to new "non-essential" commitments. I would sign up for a weekly class and then only attend once or twice. Sometime last winter, though, I discovered a studio with a full and flexible schedule — drop in classes literally morning, noon, and night — and I was off. Initially — and this is how Seane Corn describes her experience too — I was mostly aware of how good the physical workout felt. (I'm doing "core power yoga" — a fusion that is indeed more of a sweaty workout than I'd experienced in yoga classes before.) But at some point a few months on, I realized that yoga was working in far more significant ways on my energy, my sense of spiritual and mental well-being, the way I moved through the rest of my life. Several of my colleagues were nearly simultaneously going through a similar process with yoga in their off-hours. And we're not special or strange in this. There has been a recent spate of journalistic pieces — some snide, some appreciative — on the way yoga has suddenly taken in cities, small towns, schools, and workplaces. Perhaps I'm justifying the fact that this program, as much as any we've done, indulged an enormous curiosity that has grown in me privately as well as professionally. But when I read Sebastian Faulks' fun new James Bond novel and found that he has the Chief Spymaster M instructing his agents to practice yoga for strength and focus, I felt we had no choice but to at least devote an hour of radio to it. Seane Corn is a wonderful and surprising voice for this exploration. She is a master teacher and a star in the ever-expanding universe of yoga teachers and trainers. She appeared as the beautiful face and body of yoga in a Nike "goddess" ad campaign, but the cadence and intensity of her voice — as she's quick to point out with some pride — reflects a blue-collar New Jersey upbringing and the fact that she is one of life's fighters. Nothing in her early life prefigured her current embodiment of yoga's alignment of strength, energy, and grace. She left home and school to move to New York City at 16, found work as a waitress, and partied hard. She discovered yoga at 19, as she was on the edge of sanity. She had been battling an undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she says was connected with an episode of childhood sexual abuse. The drama of Seane Corn's story makes for a fascinating conversation. But she is also a very down to earth guide into the basic facts that make yoga a powerful tool for life. She is able to explain what it is about yoga that uniquely energizes and challenges body, mind, and spirit — the combination of physical postures and rhythmic breathing which oxygenate and tone the muscles, joints, and glands — while at the same time cultivating a meditative state. I've written a more personal essay on our blog this week about the changes this practice has affected in me — the very unexpected lessons it has brought to the rest of my life. On this point, too, the intensity of Seane Corn's story is compelling. But it also throws into relief parallel experiences I've had and heard about in others that have practiced yoga in varying forms and degrees. Corn had been practicing yoga for years until one day she was filled, walking home, with an utterly strange sensation, which she finally understood to be a sense of joy, of happiness. Her practice of yoga is thoroughly interwoven, at this point, with her understanding of grace, God, and love. But the way she comes at that — and expresses it — is anything but light and airy. The joy and love at the heart of yoga drive her to be ruthlessly honest about the darkness in herself and to face the darkness in the world. She takes yoga's sense of the teacher in every experience with utter seriousness — working with organizations helping get teenage prostitutes off the streets, for example, from Los Angeles to Cambodia. I believe that the spiritual aspect and essence of yoga — the relationship of the spiritual to the physical experience, the vocabulary by which we understand and process that relationship — will vary substantially from person to person. Like meditation, this ancient spiritual technology lends itself to interpretation and incorporation with many spiritual sensibilities and religious traditions — just as its range of practices are adaptable to any type of body at any stage of vitality or disability. I also see this yoga phenomenon as part of a larger move that we've variously explored towards rooting — or rather, reintegrating — the body into spiritual and religious traditions, from Judaism to Pentecostal Christianity. There is some wonderful, fundamental insight here that many of us are reclaiming from wildly different directions. And as Matthew Sanford still so memorably put it to me, the more completely we inhabit our own bodies with both their strengths and their flaws, the more compassionate we become towards all of life. That's the kind of earthy, reality-based mystery I love. Namaste.

Recommended Reading

In this program, you'll hear an excerpt from this DVD of Seane Corn discussing her concept of "body prayer." Filmed live at the 2007 Yoga Journal San Fransisco Conference, Seane Corn teaches several yoga poses while discussing how she applies her yoga practice to her humanitarian efforts. You can also see a video excerpt of her demonstrating the graceful movement of "body prayer" on the companion Web site for this program.